3.20 Areas for Future Enhancement

3.20 Areas for Future Enhancement

The XDR standard lacks representations for bit fields and bitmaps,
since the standard is based on bytes. Also missing are packed (or
binary-coded) decimals.

The intent of the XDR standard was not to describe every kind of data
that people have ever sent or will ever want to send from machine to
machine. Rather, it only describes the most commonly used data-types
of high-level languages such as Pascal or C so that applications
written in these languages will be able to communicate easily over
some medium.

One could imagine extensions to XDR that would let it describe almost
any existing protocol, such as TCP. The minimum necessary for this
are support for different block sizes and byte-orders. The XDR
discussed here could then be considered the 4-byte big-endian member
of a larger XDR family.